Register Once, Reuse Always: FCT Charts Portugal’s Progress Toward an Exemplar National PID Strategy

Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) is the Portuguese national funding agency for science and research and is concerned with funding research projects, advanced training, scientific employment, R&D institutions, research infrastructures, and the transfer of scientific knowledge.

For over a decade, FCT’s commitment to open science has led to a seamless and interconnected research ecosystem where authors, funding, projects, and scientific outputs are all interconnected, contributing to the global availability of high volumes of trusted metadata about funded research.

As a publicly-funded government agency under the responsibility of the Ministry for Science, Technology, and Higher Education, FCT sought the development of a robust program for managing the flow of scientific research outputs, which gave way to the creation of an integrated information ecosystem designed to elevate national scientific activity—PTCRIS.

Building a solid foundation for funding metadata

To develop the PTCRIS ecosystem, FCT pursued two primary objectives. The first was to establish a regulatory framework and infrastructure based on researchers, organizations, outputs, projects, and funding. The second was to promote adoption of the framework to ensure interoperability and the flow of information between systems.

With both of these objectives in place, FCT had a solid foundation from which to build a healthy, functional, interconnected national PID (persistent identifier) program while continuing to add value through additional services such as indicator and analytics tools to monitor and measure open science.  

Today, because of its investment in PTCRIS, FCT has made gains toward realizing its vision of establishing Portugal as a global reference for research and innovation while ensuring knowledge generated by scientific research underpins social and economic development.

ORCID, open science, and the driving forces behind R&D

As an early adopter of ORCID in 2013, FCT became a member in order to both reduce the administrative burden of scientific researchers and to receive reliable and accessible national scientific data. FCT even found that as a result of using ORCID, Portuguese researchers are saving approximately 154 hours per year.

The rise of ORCID adoption by researchers within Portugal has contributed to the visibility and traceability of scientific activities. Researchers are encouraged and educated about the importance of their unique ORCID metadata to the national research ecosystem. In turn, ORCID has helped propel Portugal’s Research & Development by ensuring that more of Portugal’s scientific research can be both validated and discovered.

In fact, FCT reports that between 2020 and 2024, the percentage of Portuguese researchers with ORCID iDs rose to around 80%, which ranks among the highest ORCID adoption rate for countries that have established communities of practice. FCT’s approach also impacts the completeness of the records, being that Portugal is one of the countries with the highest percentage of completeness according to Dimensions and Crossref data.

ORCID was selected after a formal evaluation process based on technical reliability, metadata completeness, API coverage, and ease of integration. Notably, ORCID already supported key integrations with Crossref, Scopus, and DataCite, which allowed PTCRIS to bootstrap an effective interoperability strategy with minimal custom infrastructure investment.

However, getting this level of ORCID adoption was not achieved by FCT requiring ORCID iDs for Portuguese researchers, but rather by implementing ORCID at a national level and further promoting ORCID as a means for researchers to save significant hours on administrative tasks necessary for grant applications.

The high ORCID adoption rate among researchers in Portugal has had the corollary effect of ensuring that high-quality metadata can flow between systems. For example, CIÊNCIAVITAE, Portugal’s scientific curriculum platform, automatically syncs with ORCID to populate high-quality funding metadata to researchers’ ORCID records, with their permission, of course.

None of this would have been possible without the foundational framework of the PTCRIS program. What makes PTCRIS exemplary is not only its technical robustness, but its grounding in formal software engineering practices. The synchronization framework was verified using formal specification languages, ensuring stability, correctness, and scalability before its national rollout. This foresight underpins the framework’s success and FCT’s strategic leadership in PID infrastructure.

To learn more about FCT and Portugal’s National PID strategy, catch the replay of ORCID in the Wild featuring Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia or download the presentation. If you are ready to integrate your system(s) with ORCID, reach out to our team.